Up to now, American doctors have been adamantly opposed to the practice. But now? Many seem to have come around to thinking, “Weeeellll… if I DON’T cut off this little girl’s clitoris here in my office, her Muslim parents will just send her to back to Somalia and have it done by some butcher with no anaesthesia and no antiseptics… so, maybe we’ll just give the girls’ clit a LITTLE slice, to keep the Muslim parents happy.”
Of course, in the REAL world, if we allow this, many doctors are going to feel pressured to do a LOT more than just a teeny “ritual nick.”
I strongly suspect it’s only a matter of time before American doctors, including many who consider themselves proud progressives, are going to be doing full-scale clitoris removals.
The article is too vague about what “nick” entails, however the way to deal with parents bringing their daughters back to Somalia to have the operation done is to do away with the principle of double illegality in such cases and prosecute the parents on their return to the USA, and to remove all the other children in the household. This has been the law in Denmark for a number of years with good results. I think something similar is the law in a number of other European countries.
That was quick. I had expected at least a few posts on the subject before being derailed by anti-circumcision fanatics.
From what I’ve read the nick is literally just a pinprick. It’s not pleasant, no, but I don’t really see how we can be for the male foreskin removal and not for a tiny pinprick on the clitoris. Yes, any actual mutilation would be wrong. But a tiny nick–I really doubt we have to worry about “They terk our clitorises!”
ETA: I’m not anti male circ. I don’t really have a dog in that fight. But I do think that it’s odd that if you don’t care about the foreskin removal that the tiny nick would bother you.
I point out that a very large medical organization has just taken a step toward accommodating a practice they were calling barbaric not long ago.
Even if the doctors now tell themselves, “Oh, we’ll just do a TINY nick, not a full removal,” there’s no getting around some troubling facts:
The doctors have blinked. They’ve decided to try to compromise which will only encourage Muslim parents to stand fast until the doctors knuckle under completely.
If the doctors’ rationale is, “We HAVE to give our clients what they want, or they’ll go to someone else who will, someone more dangerous,” well, what if the “nick” ISN’T enough to satisfy Somali parents? Won’t they STILL decide to send their kids where they can get the full treatment? How long, then, until doctors just shrug and say, “Fine, I’ll take off the whole thing- better here than in a mud hut somewhere in the Third World?”
Of course everything about the practice is horrible, but its not entirely black and white to me in this case. Where there is a high likelihood that it would happen anyway in a much less safe and more gruesome manner it could be the better of two bad choices.
If it genuinely is just a prick, I don’t really see it as “blinking” so much as it is the lesser of two evils.
I have read that some societies just do the nick to begin with…that is, it’s not like it’s an “instead of.” It seems sort of a pointless ritual to me, but it doesn’t seem harmful. I don’t believe that the “other cultures” argument has much weight for the most part, but I do think it might have some if foreskin removal gets little condemnation from the same people decrying a nick as “barbaric.” Question to the OP–in a culture where the nick isn’t some slippery slope to clitoral removal and it really is just a tiny pinprick, is it still barbaric?
If beneficial, i.e. if necessary to correct a medical problem, then obviously that’s different. I really don’t want to get involved in a lengthy male circumcision debate, but personally I don’t believe that routine circumcision, whether male or female, is “beneficial,” and I am familiar with the arguments on both sides of this issue.
How about a compromise? Instead of cutting off the clit, let them remove the homologous female equivalent of the foreskin – the clitoral hood.
Sometimes I wonder how much this practice is divided between pure woman hating versus pants on head retarded levels of puritanism. If men could still reproduce naturally without a penis would these same people be demanding we cut that off too? Or is it only woman’s sexuality that must be stamped out?
No, I don’t think that’s right. Genocide is the extermination of an entire communty. Circumcision is an unnecessary and -arguably- painful but brief procedure that MIGHT have long term psychological effects, but anecdotally at least, doesn’t make much difference.
I’m not asserting circumcision is as bad as genocide, I’m asserting it’s self evidently awful. As, obviously, is messing around with babies’ clitorises and there is no way paediatricians should be getting involved with either, for exactly the same reason that doctors don’t participate in lethal injections.
But I can’t see how you’d support circumcision and be adamantly against clit-clipping. Male babies experience real pain when they’re circumcised for little medical benefit. But I guess I’m just a fanatic.
I think the better option on the APA’s part would be a statement decrying male genital mutilation as well. But realistically, that’s just not going to happen for another 50 years at least, because male circumcision is still so widely accepted.
sigh…I just don’t know. Yes, I see where they’re coming from. And, to bring another analogous hot topic into it, it’s not entirely unlike the medical abortion vs. back alley abortion issue - that is, if doctors don’t perform safe abortions, women will seek out unsafe options instead…
But I still don’t like it. I have to agree that the way to stop genital mutilation probably isn’t to cede to it and perform a smaller genital mutilation, but to prosecute those who do perform or have it performed, whether it’s here or in another country. I mean, if you took your US citizen kid to [insert third world country with no laws forbidding child prostitution here] to pimp them out there, you’d be prosecuted when you came back to the US, right? Right? (Please gods, tell me that’s right…)